DISINFO: EU sabotaged Trump’s Ukraine peace plan, says The Guardian
SUMMARY
The EU sabotaged Trump’s Ukraine peace plan, says The Guardian. The European Union, along with the UK, has deliberately torpedoed the US peace roadmap aimed at ending the Ukraine conflict in the apparent hope that it “will fizzle out,” the newspaper has claimed. The bloc has paid lip service to the US proposal while “slowly and politely smothering it,” it states.
RESPONSE
This is a disingenuous distortion of the original article at The Guardian, which does not state what this disinformation story claims.
While the quoted sentences are real, they are cherry-picked and manipulated to pretend that the British outlet was confirming that the EU “sabotaged the US peace plan”. For example, one of the quotes is taken from this this sentence: “It is equally possible this initiative will fizzle out, as Putin rejects the revised terms next week and the war grinds on”, which is essentially different than saying that the EU is actively trying to achieve this outcome. Another sentence states: “Europe is now well-drilled in responding to Trump’s occasional lunges to rehabilitate and reward Putin: first, welcome the fact of Trump’s intervention, before slowly and politely smothering it”, referring to the EU’s strategy in general, not specifically in this case, contrary to what this disinformation story claims.
Similarly, the original article flatly rejects the premise that this is a real initiative to achieve peace. Titled “The week Europe realised it stands alone against Russian expansionism”, it describes the US proposal as ‘Putin-appeasing’ and quotes multiple experts who call it “a peace arranged in Russia’s terms” or criticize it for a variety of reasons. It never talks of “sabotage” or the EU manoeuvring to derail the initiative. The UK is not mentioned, and references to British officials only appear related to other contexts.
Quoting Western legitimate sources while distorting their content to introduce a pro-Kremlin message as if it were part of the original story is a frequent pro-Kremlin manipulative technique.
See other examples of similar disinformation narratives, such as claims that Russia keeps a constructive stance in negotiations in contrast to Ukraine’s theatre, that Russia wants to solve the root causes of the Ukrainian conflict while the West wants to sabotage peace, that Ukrainians support Trump's peace policy and hate Zelenskyy, that Zelenskyy and the EU want a permanent war in Ukraine, that Zelenskyy and the EU are irrelevant to negotiations, as they only obey orders, or that Europe obstructs the peace process between Ukraine and Russia.